Art From A Fractured Past Edited by Cynthia E. Milton

ART FROM A
FRACTURED PAST
Memory and Truth-Telling in
Post–Shining Path Peru
Cynthia E. Milton, ed i tor
With an afterword by Steve J. Stern

a rt from a fr act u r ed pa st
ART FROM A FR ACTU RE D PA ST
m e mory a n d t ru t h- t el l ing in
p ost–shin ing pat h peru
c y n t hi a e. m ilt on | edi t or
a f t erwor d | st e v e j. st er n
Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2014

© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Typeset in Whitman by Copperline Book Services, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Art from a fractured past : memory and truth-telling in
post–Shining Path Peru / Cynthia E. Milton, editor.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5515-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5530-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Arts—Political aspects—Peru. 2. Collective memory in art.
3. Peru—Politics and government—1980– I. Milton, Cynthia E.
nx180.p64a89 2013
700.985'09048 — dc23
2013025658
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the

Canada Research Chair in Latin American History at the Université de
Montréal, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.
Para Carlos Iván Degregori,
nuestro querido maestro sabio,
siempre presente
con ten ts
Acknowledgments ix
introduction | cynthia e. milton

Art from Peru’s Fractured Past 1
part one
visual representations of recent pasts
one | cynthia e. milton

Images of Truth: Rescuing Memories of Peru’s
Internal War through Testimonial Art 37
two | edilberto jiménez quispe

Chungui: Ethnographic Drawings of Violence
and Traces of Memory 75
three | maría eugenia ulfe

Narrating Stories, Representing Memories:
Retablos and Violence in Peru 103
part two
telling stories of political violence
four | víctor vich

Violence, Guilt, and Repetition:
Alonso Cueto’s Novel La Hora Azul 127
viii | contents
five | luis rossell, alfredo villar, and jesús cossio

Rupay: (Hi)stories of Political Violence in Peru, 1980–1984 139
six | ponciano del pino

Ayacuchano Cinema and the Filming of Violence:
Interview with Palito Ortega Matute 153
part three
performing a fr actured past
seven | ricardo caro cárdenas

Commemorative Paths in Sacsamarca 179
eight | cynthia m. garza

Colliding with Memory: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani’s
Sin Título, Técnica Mixta 197
nine | jonathan ritter

The “Voice of the Victims”:
Testimonial Songs in Rural Ayacucho 217
afterword | steve j. stern

The Artist’s Truth: The Post-Auschwitz Predicament
after Latin America’s Age of Dirty Wars 255
Bibliography 277
Contributors 293
Index 297
ack now ledgmen ts
This project started ten years ago, almost to the day, when I wandered through
Ayacucho’s central plaza on the late afternoon prior to the Peruvian Truth Com-
mission’s arrival the next day to submit their Final Report. Colorful carpets (al-
fombras) made by schoolchildren and local groups from flower petals, chalk, and
other materials surrounded the plaza, posterboards displayed images of the con-
flict and visitors’ comments about them, in the corner stood an enormous stage
in a style of a wooden triptych retablo. Nearby, an exhibition displayed some of
the entries for an art contest on memories of the internal conflict. On this day,
and those that followed, I was struck by how visually rich the conflict was and
its aftermath as Peruvians engaged with their recent fractured past. As an his-
torian, I wondered what stories and memories emerged from these representa-
tions. A few of us were pondering similar questions at the time, Olga González,
Jonathan Ritter, María Eugenia (Makena) Ulfe, and Víctor Vich, among others.
Soon it became clear that the range and array needed a cooperative and collec-
tive approach to begin to understand the myriad of cultural responses to the
conflict. This edited volume is the result. However, the work is far from com-
plete. A whole new generation of Peruvians and Peruvianists are continuing to
ask about the cultural impact and means of broaching Peru’s conflict.
The intellectual origins of this book also trace back to a workshop held on
Robben Island, organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Legacies of
Authoritarianism (loa) Research Circle. With its infamous history as a former
leper colony, holding spot for immigrants, and later apartheid prison, the island
has since transformed into a memory museum and education center. Here in
June 2000, activists, artists, practitioners, former and future truth commission-
ers, academics, journalists, and students from around the world came together
to reflect on the dark heritage of authoritarian rule. Over the course of those few
x | acknowledgments
days, both art as a medium for truth-telling and the creative practices necessary
for transition away from authoritarian regimes came to the fore. One result of
our conversations was a book that tried to visually lay out the possibilities of
artistic engagement with difficult pasts, The Art of Truth-Telling about Authori-
tarian Rule. I thank Leigh A. Payne, Ksenija Bilbija, and Jo Ellen Fair for this
experience, and Louis Bickford as well for bringing me into the larger project.
Another root of this book lay deeply in the Social Sciences Research Council
(ssrc) training and research project led by the faculty scholars Elizabeth Jelin,
Carlos Iván Degregori, Eric Hershberg, Steve J. Stern, among others. While I
was only indirectly involved in this ssrc project (via the loa Research Circle)
and only one contributor to this book, Ponciano del Pino, had an official role in
it, it created a whole generation of Latin and North American scholars dedicated
to studying the aftermath of dictatorships in Peru and the Southern Cone. This
ssrc project inflects this book, and many of us have benefited from the energy
and dynamism that continues to be felt in the region.
Many, many people have contributed to this book in conversation and pub-
lic presentations (in particular at a panel on this topic held at Latin American
Studies Association meeting in Montreal in 2007 and at the 2008 conference in
Lima coorganized by the iep and idehpucp five years after the Peruvian Truth
and Reconciliation Commission). Just to name only some people who have par-
ticipated in discussions leading to this book: Carlos Aguirre, Claudio Barrien-
tos, Karen Bernedo, Ralph Buchenhorst, Jo-Marie Burt, Gisela Cánepa, Peter
Dietsch, Eduardo González, Olga González, Elizabeth Jelin, Richard Kerna
ghan, Catherine LeGrand, Erica Lehrer, Salomón Lerner, Lika Mutal, Nelly
Plaza, Félix Reátegui, José Luis Rénique, Javier Torres, Alberto Vergara, María
Inez Vásquez, and Markus Weissert. Others are acknowledged in the follow-
ing chapters. I express my gratitude to all the artists whose works are included
here, and to the different organizations that have granted permission for their
inclusion, especially the Servicios Educativos Rurales. I heartily acknowledge
as well those people who have helped with the tricky mechanics of putting this
mélange of languages, texts, and images together: Jen Akers, Elizabeth Becker,
Jane Remick, and Katherine Saunders-Hastings for their assistance in various
stages of translation; Andrea García, Socorro Naveda, Vera Lucía Ríos, and Sofia
Vera for information that they helped gather; Bill Nelson for the maps; and
acknowledgments | xi
Lori Curley for the index. Thanks to Geneviève Dorais, Marc Drouin, Marie-
Christine Dugal, Steve Lamarche, Tuong-Vi Nguyen, Louis Otis, Nicolás Rodrí-
guez, Hélène Rompré, and Guillaume Tremblay for their comments inside and
outside the classroom. Monica Eileen Patterson (another loa connection) and
Camille Boutron have also commented on earlier drafts, for which I am grate-
ful. I thank Raúl Hernández Asencio and Pati Zárate for their friendship and
for overseeing this project since its early stage as a loose idea. Stephan Rinke at
the Latin American Institute at the Freie Universität and Barbara Göbel at the
Ibero-Amerikanisches Institute in Berlin provided me with an ideal setting in
which to complete this manuscript. I am fortunate to have had such dedicated
external readers for this project, one anonymous, the other Paulo Drinot. They
both provided very insightful comments and more examples to consider. Paulo
continued to participate in this project until the final version and thus deserves
special recognition for his hand in this book. Many thanks to Valerie Millhol-
land, who heard of this project many years back and showed enthusiasm for it,
and to Gisela Fosado, Jessica Ryan, and Martha Ramsey for their help to bring
it to fruition.
My gratitude to the many funding organizations that have contributed to this
book and to the larger research projects on alternative truth-telling and art in
the aftermath of violence of which this book is a part: the Social Science and
Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds québécois de recherche sur
la société et la culture, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Faculté des
arts et des sciences at the Université de Montréal, and the Alexander Von Hum-
boldt Foundation.
This book is dedicated to Carlos Iván Degregori, who has been a mentor with-
out borders for many of us and an inspiration to all. He understood the impor-
tance of the intersection between academia and public obligation. Through his
compassion and intellect, Carlos Iván shows us how with one life it is possible
to touch many, to listen, to learn, and to share with others.
in troduction | c y n thi a e. milton
a rt from peru’s fr act u r ed pa st
I
n Adiós Ayacucho [Farewell Ayacucho] Julio Ortega recounts from the perspec-
tive of Alfonso Cánepa, a community leader from the department of Ayacucho,
the travails of finding postmortem justice in a country that offers little justice
for the living. When he was accused of being a terrorist — rather than a peasant
leader — the military mutilated his body and threw what was left of it into a pit,
leaving out many of his bones and thus denying him the possibility of a proper
burial and eternal peace. Since his death Cánepa has worked to reconstruct his
body, trying to get a sympathetic hearing from the president of the Republic in
the hope that the head of state will return his bones to him. Rejected, he climbs
into the tomb of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and takes some of Pizarro’s
bones to complete his own skeleton. Written in 1986, this novella evokes the
tragedy and brutality of the war in highlands Peru, the racism and indifference
that lay at the heart of the conflict, and the long-standing historical violence
dating back to the arrival of the Spanish.1
Alfonso Cánepa’s story, though fictional, recalls the experience of hundreds
of thousands of Peruvians whose lives from 1980 until the mid-1990s were con-
vulsed by an internal war.2 According to the Peruvian Truth and Reconcilia-
tion Commission, which studied the years from the launch of Shining Path’s
“People’s War” to the fall of the Fujimori government in 2000, over 69,000
people were killed or disappeared, some 4,600 clandestine burial sites pock-
mark the country, over 40,000 children were left orphans, over 20,000 women
were left widowed, and some 600,000 internal refugees migrated to the cities
in search of safer lives.3 The scale of the destruction, loss of family and loved
ones, personal suffering, and fracturing of life trajectories and social bonds
2 | cynthia e. milton
impedes comprehension. Yet the internal war of Peru necessitates reflection

and historicization.4
Art — such as Ortega’s short story — offers a powerful means for recounting
the past and for reaching a kind of understanding. The ability of art to speak
about atrocity has been debated since Theodor Adorno famously remarked that
to write poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric.” His aphorism has often been
interpreted to mean that it is impossible, both actually and morally, to repre-
sent the Holocaust, and perhaps more broadly any atrocity, via art.5 Yet Adorno
later in life acknowledged poetry as an important means of communication for
“perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to
scream.” 6 Over the half century since the Holocaust, a plethora of artworks has
emerged to broach the difficult — in the meanings of both sensibility toward and
comprehension of — thus allowing us decades later to move beyond the taboo
of representing and giving expression to shameful and horrific pasts.7 Art may
express what formal language cannot.8 We should recognize the significant role
art can play in making difficult pasts comprehensible, even if only in part. Thus,
in a reworking of Adorno’s famous words, Steve J. Stern suggests that to not
produce art in the aftermath of suffering would be to allow barbarity to reign
unchecked.9
Indeed, in Latin America, one of the intended aims of art in response to
atrocity seems to be this: to contest the barbarity committed and to restore
the humanity of citizens who have been harmed. In the transition from state
violence to democracy and the post-transitional period, issues of representa-
tion and memory have come to the forefront of political and cultural analyses
and debates about conflict and repression in Latin America. Protest art against
authoritarian regimes and violence has made way for memorial art. In Argen-
tina, for instance, siluetazos (silhouettes), which stood out as silent protests and
evocations of missing citizens, now adorn memory sites dedicated to the desa
parecidos (disappeared). Yet art may maintain continuity in its role regardless
of regime type: whether under dictatorial or democratic rule, art contests any
totalizing vision of state power. During dictatorships, to make art could be an
act of resistance, as when Chilean women stitched picture arpilleras (appliqués)
whose imagery denounced the Pinochet regime’s human rights abuses.10 So, too,
in post-conflict democracies, art reminds audiences of the ongoing tensions of
introduction | 3
the unresolved past in the present. For instance, post–civil war novels in Central
America reference the violence of earlier decades in the context of today’s inse-
curity;11 and the creativity of the escraches (public denunciations of perpetrators)
by Argentine and Chilean youth “remind us that while the dictatorships and
even democratic regimes have tightly controlled our understanding of the real,
cultural practices constantly subvert that discursive order.” 12
Art may help to achieve a fuller expression and better understanding of dif-
ficult and contested pasts. In a conversation between the historian Gonzalo
Sánchez and the artist María Elvira Escallón, who made a photography exhibi-
tion after a bombing of a social club in Bogota, Sánchez reflects on the limits of
written texts in recounting the Colombian violence: “a text cannot say every-
thing about the pain that covers our daily tragedies. We need to turn to images,
and the multiple possibilities of artistic language.” 13 Art may help not only those
who have gone through traumatic events to put shape and give meaning to their
experiences — to express something about the pain, to paraphrase Sánchez —
but art may also help those who have not directly experienced such events to
come closer to a sympathetic awareness of them. As Kyo Maclear has written in
the context of post–atomic bombings Japan, art can move viewers “emotionally
and intellectually toward the unknown.” 14 For some survivors, art came out of
necessity and a desire to record what happened for future generations: “even now
[thirty years later] I cannot erase the scene from my memory. Before my death
I wanted to draw it and leave it for others,” said Iwakichi Kobayashi, a seventy-
year-old survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.15 Thus, art also asks con-
temporary and future others to bear witness to the artists’ acts of witnessing.
It is this combination of telling, witnessing, and drawing others toward the
unknown by representing it through artistic means that is explored here. This
book considers the role of literary, visual, oral, and performance arts in the
sharing of individual and collective memories as a means to complement our
historical understanding of Peru’s fractured past. This combination of artistic
forms of expression is of fundamental importance, for it allows a much broader
swath of society to participate in the reconstruction and re-presentation of the
past — often marginalized groups who would otherwise be excluded from main-
stream media and modes of communication.16 In societies where the written
word may impede the narration of their experiences, and in the wake of severe
violence when the ability to speak may be blocked,17 art may be one of the few
modes by which people can recount the past. Thus, the compilation of artworks
in this book represents a call for an expansion of the archive to include other
repositories of memory and history, beyond state-produced, written records
and the collection of oral testimonies that emerge through official inquiries like
truth commissions and trials.18
From the Internal Conflict to Memory Battles

Much of the art studied in this book is in dialogue with or takes as its point
of departure the work of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación; cvr), a formal body assigned to inves-
tigate Peru’s internal conflict of 1980–2000. While artists had been producing
art during this period, the emergence of a truth commission in 2001 broadened
the public sphere for discussing this past by other means.
After the sudden fall of Alberto Fujimori in November 2000, the option of
a truth commission — an established mechanism used by other countries in
the post–Cold War era — stood out as one of the ways that Peru’s government
could mark regime change.19 Unlike Latin American truth commissions that
had investigated periods during military and authoritarian regimes, Peru’s com-
mission addressed violence that had occurred mainly under the stewardship of
democratically elected governments: those of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980–
1985), Alan García Pérez (1985–1990), and Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000, with
the suspension of Congress in 1992). In addition, whereas other truth-seeking
mechanisms in the Southern Cone had named state forces as primary perpe-
trators, Peru’s truth commission found the armed group the Communist Party
of Peru–Shining Path (Partido Comunista del Perú — Sendero Luminoso) largely
responsible. Furthermore, the Peruvian truth commission held a wider man-
date than those of its neighbors. For instance, the cvr’s scope was consider-
ably broader than that of the first Chilean truth commission, known as the
Rettig Commission, which at the time could investigate only the cases that led
to death and disappearance.20 In Peru, the cvr investigated assassinations and
kidnappings, disappearances, torture and other serious wounds, harm against
collective rights of Andean and native communities, and other grave violations
of people’s rights.21 The cvr’s mandate was to determine the responsibility for
introduction | 5
abuses and violations, identify and report on the experiences of victims, and
develop proposals for reparations and reforms. The cvr sent out investigative
teams to collect testimonies from remote regions. Furthermore, the cvr held
public hearings (audiencias públicas) wherein local community members could
participate, unique among Latin American truth commissions and perhaps a
modified form of South Africa’s sessions for victims and their families.22 As part
of their attempt to make the past accessible, the cvr’s documentation is openly
available in an archive constructed especially to house it.23 Internationally, the
Peruvian truth commission is considered successful because of the depth and
breadth of their investigation, which was based on almost seventeen thousand
testimonies in Peru’s twenty-four departments, collected, compiled, and ana-
lyzed by a staff of over five hundred members.24 In addition, the cvr forwarded
forty-seven cases to the Office of the Prosecutor General to pursue.
In the case of Peru justice and truth were both goals of the cvr, thereby
breaking with the expected framework of previous transitional justice scholar-
ship of the 1980s and 1990s that assumed states could pursue only one at the
expense of the other. After the strong civil society protests against Fujimori’s
third five-year mandate, which contributed to his sudden resignation, the sub-
sequent interim president, Valentín Paniagua, took on parallel projects of ac-
countability and truth-seeking. Paniagua’s transitional government returned
Peru to the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights while
also establishing an ad hoc state and civil society committee to consider forming
a truth commission. Human rights groups, who for years had been coalescing
under the umbrella of the National Human Rights Coordinator (Coordinadora
Nacional de Derechos Humanos), played a key role in both the broad societal ef-
forts to topple Fujimori and in establishing an agenda for public truth-seeking.25
A series of pivotal events further combined to create a propitious environment
for a truth commission. First, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled
that the Peruvian state was responsible for the deaths of residents of Barrio
Altos in 1991 and repealed the 1995 amnesty laws protecting security forces from
prosecution for any abuses committed since 1980. Second, videos were leaked
that incriminated opposition parties, the armed forces, and businessmen in the
Fujimori government’s web of corruption. These events, in particular the damn-
ing videos, weakened the political and military elites and bolstered their resolve
to publically distance themselves from the Fujimori regime and to support the
new democracy.26 As Carlos Iván Degregori noted, in Peru the truth commis-
sion, unlike those of other countries in the region, emerged not from a “pacted
transition” but from the auspicious political vacuum left by the “collapse of the
authoritarian regime.” 27
Despite this favorable setting for a broad-reaching truth commission, and de-
spite having the benefit of other countries’ experiences with truth commissions,
the cvr nevertheless faced constraints: it had a confined period of twenty-four
months to conduct investigations into the previous twenty years, limited re-
sources, and difficulties with translating from Quechua and other indigenous
languages into Spanish.28 Furthermore, the public, though openly embracing
the return to democracy, had a mixed reaction to a call for a truth commission.
Some survivors and groups distrusted this newer manifestation of the state that
had previously harmed them; some evangelicals chose to move on, not look
back; and people questioned such expenditures of money; among other con-
cerns.29 With the change of president from Paniagua to Alberto Toledo, “recon-
ciliation” was added to the commission’s tasks, which had originally focused on
truth-telling alone, thus perhaps laying the groundwork for frustrated expec-
tations and fears of impunity and amnesty.30 The cvr itself was a compromise,
bringing together different sectors of society, including members from Peru’s
diverse political spectrum. The appointed commissioners came from various
political parties and societal groups, including a retired air force general, a for-
mer Fujimorista congresswoman, academics, members of church and human
rights groups.31 This compromise, however, was not as marked as those of other
countries in transition had been: since Shining Path and the Revolutionary
Movement of Túpac Amaru (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru; mrta)
no longer posed a threat, the interim government did not need to negotiate with
an armed movement, nor did the government need to make large concessions,
such as a blanket amnesty, to the political and military elites, since they had
been weakened by scandal.
The cvr’s Informe final (Final Report), made public August 28, 2003, attempts
to give both an account of the violence, of what happened, and an explanation of
the violence, of why it happened.32 Looking at this period of conflict from 1980
to 2000 (including the years from the capture of Shining Path’s leader, Abimael
introduction | 7
Guzmán, in 1992 to the end of Fujimori’s authoritarian regime in 2000), the cvr’s
Final Report presents searing data of the nation’s suffering, whose extent had been
much greater than had been imagined at the time.33 The many conclusions of the
cvr added up to a historical narrative that evinced the long-standing problems
of racism against the nation’s indigenous population, centralization of power in
the hands of the predominantly coastal mestizo-white elite, and implementation
of “rule by abandon” whereby the state was largely absent in large swaths of na-
tional territory.34 Three out of every four victims were speakers of Quechua or
other indigenous languages, many of whom had not finished primary school and
were poorly literate, lived in rural regions, and were engaged in agricultural pro-
duction.35 The regions hardest hit were small, isolated villages in the Peruvian
highlands (in the departments of Ayacucho, Huánuco, Huancavelica, Apurímac,
Junín, and San Martín), representing 85 percent of the victims. Many were lit-
erally pueblos perdidos, small forgotten villages and hamlets with only difficult
access to urban centers. The violence affected victims differently as to not only
region and ethnicity but also age and gender: over 55 percent of the victims were
men (most between the ages of twenty and forty-nine) targeted by Shining Path
and state armed forces alike; most of the women who died (nearly 20 percent of
all ages) were the victims of indiscriminate violence and massacres leveled against
communities.36 Almost all cases of sexual violence reported to the cvr were com-
mitted against women, mainly rural.37 It was these profound class, ethnic, and
gender cleavages which ultimately explained why, according to the president of
the cvr, Dr. Salomón Lerner, “tens of thousands of citizens can disappear without
anyone in integrated society, in the society of the nonexcluded, noticing a thing.” 38
In their findings, the cvr spread the blame widely for the violence and its
escalation. While the commission condemned the armed group Shining Path
as the main perpetrators of violence (in 54 percent of cases of death and disap-
pearance) and to a much lesser extent the urban-based mrta (1.5 percent), the
commission also placed responsibility in the hands of successive governments
(Belaúnde, García, and Fujimori) and the political parties who had abdicated
authority to the armed forces (found responsible for 29 percent of the deaths and
disappearances), and police (7 percent).39
Thanks to the work of the cvr, we now have more testimonies, statistics,
and case studies that contribute to our awareness of the conflict’s hard facts
COLOMBIA
ECUADOR
N
TUMBES
LORETO
PIURA
AMAZONAS
LAMBAYEQUE CAJAMARCA
SAN MARTÍN BRAZIL
LA LIBERTAD
ANCASH
HUÁNUCO
PASCO UCAYALI
JUNÍN
MADRE DE DIOS
Lima LIMA
HUANCAVELICA
CUSCO
PACIFIC
OCEAN APURÍMAC
AYACUCHO PUNO
ICA
BOLIVIA
AREQUIPA
MOQUEGUA
Number of deaths and disappearances
1–20
TACNA
21–100
101–200 0 100 200 mi
201–500 CHILE
500–860 0 100 200 300 km
Department boundary
map 1. Deaths and disappearances (1980–2000) according to Comisión de la Verdad y

Reconciliación, Informe final (Lima: Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003), vol.
1, 157. Reproduction by Bill Nelson.
introduction | 9
and historical truths.40 The Peruvian truth commission was the main national
effort to reconstruct what had happened and create a new (potentially national)
narrative about the internal conflict. Yet, probably as in all post-conflict regions,
the history remains contested, far from any kind of consensus or single version.
The difficulty comes perhaps in trying to give an explanation of why events hap-
pened and to string together the years of violence into a coherent historical nar-
rative, one with a beginning, middle, and end. According to Lerner, the human
rights violations suffered during this period “exceed the amount of human loss
suffered by Peru in all the external and civil wars that have happened in its 182
years of independence,” thus making comprehension difficult.41
Yet, despite the lack of a single, coherent narrative, most Peruvians would
probably agree on a vague outline of the internal conflict: that the nation under
went a wave of violence that affected predominantly highland and Amazonian
communities, and that by the early 1990s this violence could be felt in Lima
(especially after the July 1992 car bombing on Tarata Street in Miraflores, an
affluent neighborhood in Lima). Nevertheless, much heated debate is fueled
by competing versions of details of the conflict (and even of what to call it —
conflict/war/political violence) and, particularly, of who was responsible for the
violence and to what extent. These memory battles continue to rage today.
It would be too simple to say that there is an official versus a nonofficial ver-
sion of the conflict, since a plethora of camps exists, each with their own expe-
riences and memories. That said, the two most prominently circulating narra-
tives of this period can be characterized as “salvation memory” and “human
rights memory.” 42 In “salvation memory,” espoused mainly by the armed forces
and neoliberal elites, human rights violations were committed by a few rogue
elements in the armed forces, Fujimori’s heavy hand and disregard for human
rights was the price paid for breaking Shining Path, Shining Path as instigator
was thus solely responsible for the violence, and “we” in Lima did not really
know the extent of what was going on (and with this lack of knowledge comes
a kind of absolution). This narrative presents Fujimori as the economic and
physical savior of Peru: he saved Peruvians from García’s hyperinflation, cap-
tured Abimael Guzmán, thus effectively decapitating Shining Path, and he later
crushed the last of the much smaller guerilla group mrta, in a dramatic resolu-
tion to a nearly four-month hostage crisis.43
The “human rights memory” narrative, held by many human rights groups
and organizations of affected family members, does not portray the end of the
internal conflict as a victory over terrorism but situates the violence as an exten-
sion of ongoing legacies of social and political inequalities of which Shining Path
was a symptom and on which Shining Path was able build its movement. Shin-
ing Path, the main perpetrator of violence, launched a conflict that was exacer-
bated by the armed forces’ “dirty war” tactics, which did not respect the rule of
law.44 In this narrative, the role of civil society, the self-defense patrols (rondas),
and individual acts of heroism are highlighted. The “human rights memory”
narrative further points to what the “salvation memory” effaces: Fujimori’s fail-
ure to root out the causes of Shining Path’s strength (endemic poverty, racism,
unequal access to economic and social resources and the benefits of inclusion
within the nation-state). This narrative clearly allocates blame for the escalation
of violence to two competing forces — Shining Path and the state — yet tends to
focus more on the violence committed by the state and perpetuates the image
of Peruvians as caught between these “two fires.” This focus on responsibility is
slightly different from that of the cvr’s Final Report, which emphasizes Shining
Path’s violence and acknowledges the armed forces’ human rights abuses but
also points a finger at the nonviolent actors in Peruvian society in general for
having produced a “grammar of violence” 45 that fostered the injustices that lay
at the heart of the violence.
The Final Report of the cvr is the closest thing Peru has to an official ver-
sion of the conflict. Yet, even though the cvr was government mandated, no
administration has claimed it as their own, thus, eschewing any self-reflection
by the state that would bring about the changes recommended within the Final
Report. The work of the cvr — whose impact continues as a reparations program
slowly advances, cases come before the judiciary, and a proposed national mem-
ory museum (Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social [Place
of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion]) takes shape — has occurred in the
context of antagonistic relationships with subsequent administrations. Thus it
is not quite accurate to refer to the cvr’s Final Report as “la historia official”; it
is an “official” history with which most officials are ill at ease.
Domestically, the commission faced serious challenges in the diffusion of their
findings, particularly from the political party Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
introduction | 11
Americana (apra), Fujimoristas (supporters of Fujimori), some high-level church

officials, and the armed forces, all of whom were named as responsible for facili-
tating the violence. A campaign to discredit the commission’s findings led to ac-
cusations of conflicts of interest among commissioners, claims of malfeasance,
and the use of the appellation “lie commission.” 46 The Office of the Prosecutor
General seemed reluctant to pursue the criminal cases forwarded to them by
the commission, making public statements that potentially undermined the
public reception of the commission’s work overall.47 Importantly, the statistical
findings, while most likely giving general indicators of tendencies, remain in
question.48 The Final Report held the limelight for a relatively short time after
its publication. Indeed, it may have spurred more debate prior to its actual pub-
lication than immediately after.49 After the report’s release, the media quickly
turned to issues of the nation’s economy.
Former members and advocates of the commission have found it difficult to
engage the public in a sustained way or get the Final Report adopted as the na
tional account of the conflict years, despite their efforts to disseminate the cvr’s
findings through public hearings, photography exhibitions, workshops, and the
publications of a book-length version of the Final Report, Hatun Willakuy,50 and a
forty-page bilingual summary, among other initiatives. Nevertheless, the com-
mission’s work and memories of this recent past have continued to take center
stage, abruptly at times, in the national media — as happened during Fujimori’s
trials, on the occasion of the vandalizing of the memorial to the nation’s victims
El Ojo que Llora (The Eye That Cries) in Lima, and when the political wing of
Shining Path (Movimiento por Amnistía y Derechos Fundamentales) attempt
to register as an official political party.
Memory of the war years in Peru does not seem at risk of becoming “inert his-
torical memory” 51 in national public discourse or of just emerging episodically in
the form of “memory irruptions.” 52 Since the publication of the Final Report in
2003, memory work for a human rights narrative has been advancing in fits and
starts, and major breakthroughs have occurred in promoting public discussion
of the past: the sentencing of Alberto Fujimori to twenty-five years in prison
for crimes against humanity, the Berlin Golden Bear award for the film The
Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada, renamed Fausta) about the intergenerational
effects of violence, and President García’s reluctant acceptance of the German
government’s donation of funds to build a memory museum in Lima. Steadily,

a new generation of Peruvians are active in the creation of intellectual forums
for the discussion of the past, for example international conferences, working
research groups, and Internet blogs.
And there is a boom in cultural production by individuals and groups affected
by the violence, concerned citizens, and ngos; this book only touches on some
of them. This cultural output expands beyond statues of fallen soldiers and the
traditional memorial art of plaques and monuments to victims, and includes a
range of creative engagements with the past. The Scarf of Hope (Chalina de Es
peranza), more than a kilometer long, incorporates knitted names and images,
scraps of clothing, and at times the favorite colors of women’s disappeared loved
ones.53 Young artists and activists, mainly from Lima, travel the country setting
up their portable exhibits as part of the Itinerant Museum: Art for Memory
(El Museo Itinerante Arte por la Memoria).54 El Ojo que Llora in Lima has been
successfully used as a space to commemorate and serve as a meeting point for
families of victims and human rights groups. “Little eyes” (ojitos) and memorial
art more broadly have sprouted up in the highlands in remembrance of commu-
nities’ dead and disappeared.55 And Peru has joined the international boom to
construct memory museums, even if the one in Lima advances slowly. Affected
groups and communities have built regional museums, many with the help
of human rights organizations and international financial assistance, in Aya-
cucho (Huamanga), Huancavelica, Huanta, Putacca, Totos, Lucanamarca, Hua-
manquiquia, Pampachacra, and elsewhere. These casas de memoria (memory
houses) curate Peru’s difficult history through the display of ceramics, textiles,
paintings, wax figures, retablos (three-dimensional boxes), clothing, testimonial
excerpts, letters, photographs and more in their exhibition spaces, adorning
their buildings with murals, and placing sculptures in gardens of reflection.56
Yet the question remains to whom all this memory work is speaking, and
how effectively this message is getting across to those who wish not to know or
to see things otherwise. Successful attempts to bring a human rights account
of the past into the present are dampened by counter-narratives and opposing
memories. One example of continued maneuvers to erase or rewrite the past
was the failed 2010 bid to pass a legislative decree (Decree 1097) that would
have granted de facto amnesty to individuals from the military and police being
introduction | 13
figure i.1. Sculpture by

Ayacuchan artist Wari Zárate
in the “Memory Park” in front
of the Museo de la Memoria of
anfasep (the National Associa-
tion of Kidnapped, Disappeared
and Detained Relatives of Peru),
Ayacucho. Photograph by María
Eugenia Ulfe.
processed in Peruvian courts for human rights violations committed prior to

2003.57 In a similar spirit, on the ninth anniversary of the cvr’s Final Report,
President Ollanta Humala proposed a law that could have led to an eight-year
prison term for “publicly expressing approval for, justifying, denying or min-
imizing” acts of terrorism committed by Shining Path. Congress adopted a
watered down version of the proposed law.58 Other attempts to narrow public
discussion over the recent past are the continuing acts of defacement against
one of the few national memorial sites dedicated to the victims of the armed
conflict, El Ojo que Llora.59 Reemerging conflict zones — such as those in the
coca-producing Apurímac-Ene River Valley (vrae) and mining sites like Conga
in Northern Peru — and the state response to them spawn worrisome flashbacks
figure i.2. El Ojo que

Llora (The Eye That
Cries) memorial by Lika
Mutal, Lima, defaced
in September 2007.
Photograph by Yael Rojas.
to the previous decades.60 That is, discussions of past violence sit uncomfortably
alongside its legacies and continuities.
Truth-Telling by Other Means

Members of the cvr were aware of the importance of a cultural engagement
with their findings beyond the publication of their Final Report. For the commis-
sion, visual representation played a central role in recounting a national narra-
tive. According to Lerner, the use of audiovisual means to represent events ne-
cessitates a reconsideration of the relationship between seeing, knowledge, and
power. A knowledge that arises from seeing calls on “intuition, senses, and emo-
tions that are not necessarily irrational or unscientific, but rather expand the
introduction | 15
realm of our understanding.” 61 The commission drew on established grassroots

organizations and groups previously engaged in visual and artistic expression
to promote a reflection on this past. For instance, the photography exhibition
Yuyanapaq: In Order to Remember tried to appeal to civil society by displaying
images familiar to the public, who had seen them in national newspapers. This
artful curation of photographs interspersed among draped white gauzy sheets,
housed in the crumbling ruins of a once affluent home, was meant to evoke the
healing nation.62 The commission also employed the theatre troupe Yuyachkani,
who had been actively making political and social critique since the late 1970s,
to assist in informing Lima residents (Limeños) and highland communities of
the commission’s work and to encourage people to attend the public hearings.63
The cvr understood implicitly that the social opening accorded to it also
extended to the public sphere more broadly — to nongovernmental and grass-
roots organizations, artistic groups, and individuals who had long expressed
truth narratives and alternative jurisprudence in various forms.64 Truth-telling
by other means than official inquiries flourished in the shade of the commis-
sion: for instance, in visual and performance art, memory sites, cinema, stories,
humor, rumor, and song.65 The emergence of the commission signaled new op-
portunities to speak more openly about the past, giving important legitimacy to
previously shunned or muted experiences. That is, “truth-telling” became part
of the public domain, even at times at the national level, rather than an affair
of individuals or groups.
The turn to art was not new. Art has been a means for contesting local abuses
by authorities since the colonial period. One only has to think of Guaman Poma’s
depictions of the brutality of Spaniards and their impact on local cultures in his
letter to the king as an example of early uses of art to speak truth to power.66 In
the context of Peru’s internal war, protest art has represented victims’ realities
since the early 1980s.67 Nevertheless, while local cultural forms of knowledge
have always been present — for instance, in regional artistic traditions such as
painted wooden retablos and tablas (painted panels) by Ayacuchano and Sarhua
artists depicting violence, or the lyrics of folk songs (such as huaynos and pumpin)
that give testimony to abandonment of natal lands and the disappearances of
loved ones — such forms carried a new saliency and immediacy and attained
public recognition at a national level after the launching of the cvr.
Scholars of Peru and elsewhere are increasingly employing visual and audible
representations in their analysis of the past.68 A turn toward including art —
broadly defined here as cultural practices of aesthetic representation — in our
investigations is all the more pressing for social groups for whom the written
record may exclude or limit the expression of their experiences. Moreover, the
written record is closely linked to the state and in many Peruvian highland com-
munities the presence the state was weak, and the state itself may have been an
aggressor. Thus, the essays in this book seek to trace some of the ways Peruvians
utilize artistic means to describe their past, to understand it, and, in some sense,
to bring about alternative justice, social repair, and a historical account.
As Gisela Cánepa has aptly noted, the Peruvian public sphere is exclusionary:
Quechua, for instance, is not a language used in formal politics but is recognized
as valid in the sphere of cultural production.69 One of the striking aspects of
the artworks studied here is the way art may break down the barriers between
formal politics and cultural production. That is, art can be both a forum for and
a form of political expression.70 Indeed, spheres of representation are prominent
in Peru’s ongoing memory negotiations precisely because of the cvr’s limited
political impact and the commission’s inability to pass on their findings as Peru’s
collective memory.71
It is difficult to situate neatly many of these visual representations that emerge
from the political conflict within the field of art: are they “folk art,” are they
“popular art,” are they “artisanal,” are they “art”? Such efforts to label and cat-
egorize the work may merely reproduce the very hierarchies that are at the root
of Peru’s injustices. These artforms do not represent traditional versus modern
epistemologies, nor are they fixed in time or place. They circulate in the global
era, are sold to foreigners and collectors, and are displayed in private homes and
in museums.72 The artists themselves travel and import other genres, such as
Chilean arpilleras, to Peru.73 And the artists, like many of the survivors of vio-
lence, may have left their natal lands to rebuild their lives in regional capitals,
Lima, or abroad. As William Rowe and Vivian Schelling have written, dichot-
omies of traditional/contemporary, rural-folk/urban-mass culture are no lon-
ger useful for analyzing artworks in general, principally because artistic media
(mobile retablos, cds, stories, paintings, the Internet, etc.) and their creators and
performers easily move across geographical and social boundaries.74
introduction | 17
Bearing Witness through Creation: An Aesthetic Pursuit of Truth

The essays that follow are only a selection of the many and various modes Peru-
vians are making use of to bear witness to their past: drawings, paintings, film,
commemorative acts and sites, literature, music, performance, and regional art-
forms. Yet art as a means to bear witness, and in so doing shape contemporary
cultural perceptions of the past, faces different challenges from the ones in-
volved in nonartistic processes of historical clarification such as the cvr’s writ-
ing of its Final Report and gathering of oral testimonies. Oral testimonies might
hold a privileged place as evidence, since they are considered closer to the body
of the sufferer, whereas art seems more distant and removed by dint of the pro-
cess of production.75 In other words, the truth value of art (the truth or falsity of
its depictions) is brought into question by the very medium of expression — the
fact that art is born from the imagination. For art to bear witness to the past, it
must be seen to possess authenticity and accuracy, exigencies perhaps unrealis-
tic considering the passage of time and the act of creation.
Even when direct witnesses themselves generate art, does art witness ac-
curately? Artworks are, after all, made, fabricated, created and are not direct
traces or artifacts of the past. In our era when photographs are regarded by the
distrustful eye of everyday viewers whereas they once held a privileged trust as
direct observation — what Virginia Woolf described as “crude statement[s] of
fact addressed to the eye” 76— today a created representation is under pressure to
prove its veracity or factual worth, if its maker wishes it to serve as an expression
of empirical knowledge. Can we “trust” art and images to recount the past? Yes
and no. The vicissitudes of memory are present in artistic representations, just
as they are in oral testimonies. The well-known debate over historical truths
recounted by the psychologist Dori Laub is illustrative. In a testimony recorded
in the Yale Holocaust Testimonies, a woman narrated her witnessing of a rebel-
lion in Auschwitz, which, according to her recollection of events, resulted in
the explosion of four chimneys. In fact, only one chimney was blown up, not all
four. In this debate, scholars questioned the historical validity of this survivor’s
testimony because she remembered specific facts incorrectly. In contrast, Laub
stressed the importance of respecting what the witness did not know (or could
not know) and what she felt she “knew.” 77 A similar debate erupted over the
veracity of Rigoberta Menchú’s assisted autobiographical account of the Guate-

malan genocide: she was taken to task for inconsistencies in her story and her
accounts of events that she herself had not witnessed but recounted as through
she had been present.78 Such strident demands for accuracy ignore her use of an
inclusive “we” in her efforts to offer a collective testimony. Like that Auschwitz
survivor, Rigoberta Menchú recounted what she knew as someone who had sur-
vived to tell what had happened. As Dori Laub argues, what is important is not
the number of chimneys but “the reality of an unimaginable occurrence,” 79 the
breaking of the framework of the concentration camp so as to enable a narra-
tive of “resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame
of death.” 80
Like oral testimonies, art may break old frameworks and build new ones.
Because art is perhaps less tethered to the past and to facts than other media
of truth-telling, art makes the “unimaginable” imaginable and provides new
frames — marcos or cuadros — with which to construct new narratives. Art does
not necessarily result in a singular narrative or even a coherent one. Rather,
art may inscribe and promote multiple memories and meanings and implicitly
counters the homogenizing tendencies of institutional memories.81 As Jelin and
Longoni note, it is through words and images that the traces of horror overcome
the limits of expression, even if incomplete or fragmented. It is through these
traces that art becomes “the triumph of the word over the silence of absence.” 82
Despite their importance, the essays in this book are not directly concerned
with the truth value of art and the production of coherent narratives. Rather,
the authors have at the heart of their common inquiry the multiplicity of in-
terpretations and narratives, the myriad ways of seeing, knowing, and relat-
ing that are inscribed within the artforms under discussion. While most of the
authors here explicitly or implicitly treat artistic representations as sources of
evidence — of events ranging from specific experiences to generalized violence
— they are aware of the pitfalls of memory, the molding that takes place as a
result of an artist-survivor’s intention to tell a story a certain way, the aesthetic of
creative inspirations and impetus. Furthermore, many of the artworks studied
here move beyond the tyranny of the war years and speak to historical truths
that are not reducible to recent conflict alone, and thus to observable experience
alone. Yet these artworks do recount experience: they are acts of witnessing
introduction | 19
and remembrance and as such are valid, indispensable sources of historical

clarification.
Why are these artists creating and for whom? The potential audience may
be central to these works’ very production. The artists might hope that their
works promote awareness, inspire empathy, and create a sense of obligation
among viewers. Their representations demand that we look, that we bear wit-
ness in turn to the artists’ acts of witnessing and remembrance.83 Art may seek
to reach listeners and viewers otherwise distant from the experiences depicted
and thus serve as catalysts for change in the audience’s perception, knowledge,
and actions.84 An artist’s initial objective might be to preserve an account of the
past for fear that it will disappear, as is suggested in the drawings of Edilberto
Jiménez (chapter 2). In addition, artists might be creating for themselves, for
members of their community, and/or for an external audience, for example a
jury panel overseeing reenactments of battles between community members
and Shining Path (chapter 7), judges of an arts competition (chapter 1), or cheer-
ing local peers at pumpin song contests (chapter 9). Artworks may reach national
and international audiences, for example the wooden retablos by the Jiménez
family (chapter 2), Palito Ortega’s films, which are produced and shown in Ay-
acucho, Lima, and abroad (chapter 6), and Yuyachkani’s Peruvian, European,
and North American performances of Sin Título, Técnica Mixta (Untitled, Mixed
Media) (chapter 8).
Some artists might create these representations also with the hope of recount-
ing the past to someone as well as perhaps to seek some kind of justice or social
repair. For instance, the artworks produced for the Rescate por la Memoria (Re
covering/Rescuing Memory) contests speak of the past violence, the present pov-
erty, the need to rebuild and move on. Almost all participants forward the cry,
at least implicitly, of “Never Again,” yet very few of the entries seem to propose
reconciliation as a possibility (chapter 1). Ortega’s more sociopolitical films point
to the limits of the extant efforts at truth-telling; in particular, El rincón de los
inocentes (The Innocents’ Corner; filmed in 2005) offers an alternative narrative
of the violence years and a critique of the cvr’s missed opportunity to engage
affected communities, what the historian Ponciano del Pino articulately calls
“a metaphor for the nation’s botched encounter” (chapter 6). Víctor Vich’s study
of La hora azul (The Blue Hour) suggests that the novel’s author, a Lima resident,
is trying to come to terms with his and his fellow Limeños’ complicit role in the
violence and the nature of subsequent generations’ responsibility (chapter 4).
The collective involved in the creation of Rupay addresses (and intends perhaps
to teach) the same Limeño audience by illustrating the past via a patchwork
of comic strips, art, testimony, newspaper clippings, and photographs (chapter
5). Similarly, Miguel Rubio and Yuyachkani’s post-cvr production Sin Título,
Técnica Mixta question the nationalistic impetus behind the jingoistic narra-
tive of the late nineteenth-century War of the Pacific and seek to unravel this
tale that was taught to several generations of Peruvian schoolchildren. The play
shows how the social exclusions that resulted in Peru’s earlier ignominious de-
feat lay at the heart of the later Shining Path conflict (chapter 8).
Many of the efforts discussed in this book focus on the highlands, Ayacucho
in particular. This focus on Ayacucho reflects in part the rich cultural expres-
sions of the region, and the concentration of ngos especially in the conflict’s
wake. Ayacucho is where Shining Path chose to launch their “People’s War”
and accounts for 40 percent of the ensuing victims. Yet, it also reflects the pre-
dominance of Ayacucho in extant literature on the conflict as though the region
represented the country as a whole, which it did not. In part, this emphasis on
Ayacucho reveals the difficulties of reaching a more inclusive national reflection
on the years of violence. As a new generation of scholars emerges, and as new
studies are produced, the diverse histories of the conflict are more fully coming
to light.85
Most of the artworks studied here are not from the perspective of those who
speak on behalf of the “silenced,” such as the work of some professional artists
who present an aesthetic of suffering in the hope of documenting, educating,
and preventing reoccurrence.86 Indeed, much of the literature on art and trauma
to date focuses on the work of professional artists, many of whom hold interna-
tional renown. Rather, the essays that follow do not make a distinction among
the artworks along the lines of professional or “high” art versus other kinds.
Rather, the focus is on the artist-survivors’ representations: artwork produced
by individuals and collectivities who lived through the experiences themselves
and thus are direct witnesses, and who are engaging in art as a means “to give
testimony” (dar testimonio) — a use of art that both I and Jonathan Ritter explore
(chapters 1 and 9). As Palito Ortega Matute says in his interview, “having lived
Huancayo
Rio
Ma
ntaro
Rio
Rio A
PERU
Ma
rím
pu
ntaro
HUANTA
N
ac
Huaychao Map
Luricocha Uchuraccay Area
Huancavelica
Huanta Tambo
San Miguel
Quinua L A M AR
Ayacucho
Chungui
HUAMANGA
C ANGALLO
Chuschi Cangallo
Río Pampas Vilcashuamán
Sarhua
VÍC TO R Carhuanca Andahuaylas
FAJARDO Huancapi Abancay
Lucanamarca VI L C AS HUAM ÁN
Huanca Sancos
Sacsamarca
HUANC AS ANC O S Querobamba
Rio
S U C RE
Chicha Soras
LU C ANAS
Puquio
PARI N AC O C HAS
Coracora
P ÁU C AR D E L
S ARA S ARA
Pausa
0 10 20 30 mi
0 10 20 30 40 50 km
map 2. Department of Ayacucho. Cartography by Bill Nelson.

this experience so closely myself, I think it gives me the power to tell these sto-
ries as they were. It is my duty. My conscience compels me to tell these stories
without manipulation, without machination, without elaboration: this is the
history that happened in Ayacucho” (chapter 6). Edilberto Jiménez’s chapter
presents an interesting overlap of testimonials/alteration: Jiménez is from Víctor
Fajardo yet his work presented here is part of a larger collection of visual eth-
nographic accounts of distant Chungui (also in the department of Ayacucho).
His drawings are a unique collaborative effort between himself as an artist,
ethnographer, and regional neighbor who also witnessed the war’s devastation
and Chungui residents. The work of Lima-based artists such as Yuyachkani and
the authors of La hora azul and Rupay may reflect their own experiences and
feelings about the conflict years, perhaps a sense of collective remorse for having
lived parallel lives, or a desire to understand what occurred during those years
at a scale that was unconceivable to them prior to reading the cvr’s Final Report.
Almost all of the artists discussed in this book seem to wish to ignite empathy
among those who did not directly experience the internal war for those who did.
And perhaps by the former coming to understand the different subject positions
of the latter, such empathy might bring about a kind of societal understanding,
as unsettling as it may be to previously held perceptions of the past and individ-
ual responsibilities.
While the intentionality of the artists in their work is difficult to ascertain,
even more illusive is audience reception. One cannot assume that these works
are able to speak for themselves. What are the potential interpretations of these
works? How are they received? In the absence of deep ethnographic observation
of audience reception, the impact and understanding of these works by differ-
ent social actors is difficult to access. As Deborah Poole and Isaías Rojas-Pérez
rightly note in the case of the photography exhibit Yuyanapaq, displayed at the
time of the cvr’s publication of their Final Report, one cannot assume that view-
ers across regional, ethnic, and temporal divides will interpret images the same
way.87 For instance, who bought and read post-cvr novels like La hora azul or the
graphic novel Rupay? Who was likely to attend Yuyachkani’s performance of Sin
Título, Técnica Mixta? Are the metaphors found in the paintings of a Rescate por
la Memoria contest obvious to only regional audiences or can national audiences
introduction | 23
comprehend them? Is there a difference between urban and rural reception of

Ortega’s films, as he suggests in his interview, such that urban audiences prefer
films that directly address the conflict (what he calls “social interest films”) and
rural audiences prefer horror films based on mythical figures that indirectly hint
at the years of violence? An important next step in using artistic representations
as a means to historical clarification is to consider their impact on and uses by
Peru’s diverse audiences.
Remembering through Art: the Limits of Empathy and Truth

Art has the potential to help us, the audience, get closer to an understanding of
what happened. Perhaps it is the only medium that allows us to hold in the same
frame many of the complexities of this tragedy. Yet art is not bound to truth. It
is a medium in which competing claims to the past emerge and are recounted.
The stakes for cultural productions over the past are high. The images and nar-
ratives of the past presented through popular media may be more important for
establishing collective or, potentially, a national memory of the past than even a
truth commission, programs for reparations, and court cases. In Peru, cultural
forms of (re)presenting are the present-day battleground for memory narratives.
One of the reasons why Adorno’s quote about poetry after Auschwitz remains
salient today is that it points to the importance of culture in memory battles.
Whether a dung-adorned Madonna in a Brooklyn art gallery 88 or a quiet me-
morial tucked away in a public park, art may provoke debate, all the more so
when contested memories are in question. Art can elicit empathy, but it can
also incite the opposite.89 Public art may disturb as well as commemorate.90
The uses and abuses of the memorial El Ojo que Llora in Lima’s Campo de Marte
(Champs de Mars) illustrate this dynamic well: while the father of a disappeared
and a mother of a fallen soldier might find common solace at this memorial, and
come to recognize each other’s mutual suffering as parents, the memorial has
also evoked visceral negations by vandals of victims and their families’ right to
remembrance.91 Art in public spaces does not necessarily promote a collective
memory; indeed, art may highlight such memory’s fragmentation. Yet El Ojo
que Llora fulfills a common function of art: to promote reflection and discus-
sion. Even at moments of great controversy, such as the memorial’s defacement,
efforts to shut down conversation only served to spark debate and thus further
remembrance of the events that gave rise to this memorial site.92
It must also be acknowledged that not all art is necessarily “good” art in the
sense of serving a public function of remembrance — that is, the uses rather
than the abuses of a shared past. As editor of this compilation, I have chosen to
highlight artistic endeavors that engage a human rights narrative in Peru and
to place at center stage the multiple creative ways of seeing and recounting the
past that contest forgetting or a “salvation” narrative. But I could have included
artistic representations of salvation memory, as put forward by the “forces of
order” and Peruvian neoliberal elites, or even memories as held among Shining
Path militants.93 Indeed, such studies are necessary if we want to understand
more fully the cultural realm of memory battles.94
In Peru, memory is not synonymous with human rights. “Memory” has be-
come the trope used by individuals and groups who wish to promote a heroic
narrative for the armed forces, and culture has become the battlefield where
they contest the meaning of “memory” with those who fail to see their heroism.
For instance, armed state actors construct their own “museums of memory.”
The military perform an annual reenactment of their rescue of hostages whom
the mrta held in the Japanese ambassador’s home in 1997.95 Screenings are pro-
moted in international film festivals of the movie Vidas Paralelas (Parallel Lives),
which casts the military as untarnished heroes defending the vulnerable high-
lands people.96 These efforts to write and to promote through cultural media
a different account of the war years offer an alternative (sometimes subtle)
narrative to the one presented by the cvr: yes, this narrative seems to affirm,
there was an atrocious political conflict that cost many innocent lives and was a
national tragedy. Yet this narrative offers few lessons to be learned, other than
not to repeat. The quasi-denialist rewriting of the war era reaffirms the role of
the armed forces in it without seeking to reform the institution. This narrative
pretends a democracy and a peace, without acknowledging the thousands of
common graves on which Peruvians walk or the root causes of poverty, racism,
and exclusion that perpetuate continued discontent.
It is this rewriting of the past that the artworks presented here are working
against. As the Peruvian sociologist Félix Reátegui Carrillo has eloquently said
introduction | 25
in response to what he sees as widespread efforts to ignore Peru’s fractured past,

“Are we supposed to forget this? It is possible, but it impoverishes us and is ob-
scene. Our public dialogue demands fiction. We need to be able to imagine in
order to understand.” 97
Notes
1. Ortega, Adiós Ayacucho.
2. The date for the end of the internal war changes depending on the importance given
to specific events: on September 12, 1992, the leader of Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán,
was captured, followed by several high-ranking members. In 1993, Guzmán proposed a
“peace accord.” In 1997, the Tupác Amaru Revolutionary Movement (mrta) was erad-
icated after having held hostages for several months in the Japanese ambassador’s res-
idence. In 1999, the last member of the Shining Path leadership who had rejected the
peace accord, Feliciano (Óscar Ramírez Durand), was captured. In 2000, Alberto Fuji-
mori, who had become the symbol of authoritarian rule, resigned from the government.
The continued presence of Shining Path — though greatly diminished — in the coca-
producing regions puts into question the idea of a clear “post”–Shining Path era.
3. The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave a specific figure, 69,280,
as an estimate for the dead and disappeared caused by the internal armed conflict, based
on statistical equations used in Guatemala and Kosovo. The range is between 61,007 and
77,552. See Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (cvr), Informe final, annex 2, 13.
The numbers for widows and children come from cvr, Hatun Willakuy, 385; on internal
refugees see cvr, Hatun Willakuy, 386.
4. This project finds its genealogy in Steve Stern’s call for a historical understanding
of the episodic rendering of the internal conflict in “Beyond Enigma.” A new generation
of researchers has responded to the need to historicize Shining Path as something other
than enigmatic or “out of step.” See, for instance, dissertations by del Pino, “ ‘En busca
del gobierno’ ”; Scarritt, “The Rattle of Burnt Bread”; Yezer, “Anxious Citizenship.” Pub-
lished works include González, Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes; Heilman,
Before the Shining Path; La Serna, The Corner of the Living; Ritter, We Bear Witness With
Our Song; Taylor, Shining Path; and Theidon, Entre projímos and Intimate Enemies.
5. Adorno, Prisms, 34. On the decontextualization of Adorno’s quote, see Huyssen,
Present Pasts, 124, and on the various (mis)understandings of Adorno, see Friedlander,
Probing the Limits of Representation, especially the introduction, and Rothberg, Multi
directional Memory, 112–113. For a thoughtful discussion of the importance of Adorno’s
dictum in a Latin American context, see Stern’s afterword here.
6. See Koch, “The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable,” 15.
See also the juxtaposition of positions related to art in the shadow of the Holocaust in the
works of H. G. Adler and Theodor Adorno in Franklin, “The Long View.”
7. Studies of artistic representations after the Holocaust are many. To cite but a few:
Alphen, Caught by History; Farmer, “Going Visual”; Friedlander, Probing the Limits of
Representation; Hirsch, The Generation of Post-Memory; Huyssen, Present Pasts; LaCapra,
History and Memory after Auschwitz; LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma; Young, The
Texture of Memory; and Young, At Memory’s Edge; Zelizer, Visual Culture and the Holocaust.
8. Scarry, The Body in Pain; Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation, 5.
9. Stern, “Las paradojas de la verdad.”
10. Arpilleras became part of a social movement against the dictatorship and interna-
tionally recognizable as human rights art. See Agosín, Tapestries of Hope, and Adams,
“Art in Social Movements.”
11. For instance, Jelin and Langland, Monumentos memoriales y marcas territoriales;
Jelin and Longoni, Escrituras, imágenes y escenarios ante la represión; Gómez-Barris, Where
Memory Dwells; Lazzara, Chile in Transition; Longoni, El Siluetazo; Masiello, The Art of
Transition; Moodie, El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace; Richard, Fracturas de la memoria.
12. Masiello, The Art of Transition, 7.
13. Sánchez and Escallón, “Memoria, imagen y duelo.”
14. Maclear, Beclouded Visions, 24.
15. Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (nhk), Unforgettable Fire, 105.
16. Brett, Through Our Own Eyes; González, Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian
Andes; Milton, “At the Edge of the Peruvian Truth Commission”; Strassler, “Children as
Witnesses of History in Post-Suharto Indonesia.”
17. Scarry, The Body in Pain.
18. The incorporation of images and artforms into historians’ and other social scien-
tists’ methodologies has gained credibility since the 1980s debates on representations
as historical documents that allows us to see the past from different perspectives to be
taken into account with written and oral texts. For considerations of alternative sources
and an expansion of historians’ archives see Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire; Stern,
Remembering Pinochet’s Chile; LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz; Coronil,
“Seeing History”; Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells.
19. Greg Grandin and Thomas Klubock, in their “Editors’ Introduction,” situate truth
commissions as a product of post–Cold War reckonings with the past that served polit-
ical and institutional ends. On truth commissions see Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, and
on extended periods of reckoning see Collins, Post-transitional Justice.
20. In 2003, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, known
as the Valech Commission, investigated human rights abuses against people who had
survived the Pinochet dictatorship.
21. Article 3 of Decreto Supremo no. 065-2001-pcm.
introduction | 27
22. The cvr held eight public hearings with victims or family members, seven public
assemblies, and five theme-based hearings (on subjects such as “antiterrorist” legisla-
tion, displaced persons, universities, women, and teaching). From these public hearings,
the cvr gathered over four hundred testimonies about over three hundred cases of gross
human rights violations.
23. Aguirre, “¿De quién son estas memorias?”
24. González, “The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Chal-
lenge of Impunity,” 70.
25. González, “The Contribution of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commis-
sion to Prosecutions,” 56–57.
26. On this transitional period, see González, “The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation
Commission and the Challenge of Impunity,” 71–75.
27. Degregori, “La palabra y la escucha,” 95. “Transition by collapse”— whereby eco-
nomic and military elite are less able to control the process — may more likely lead to crim-
inal prosecutions. This was the case for Fujimori who in April 2009 received a twenty-
five-year sentence for grave human rights violations, a feat that was attained in part be-
cause of the documentation gathered by the cvr. Burt, “Guilty as Charged.”
28. While Quechua has been one of Peru’s official languages since 1993, no program
of studies in translation had been in place, and therefore there were no trained profes-
sionals as part of the commission. As Carlos Iván Degregori pointed out, long-standing
socioeconomic, linguistic, and gender divides were recreated in the composition of the
commission itself: among the cvr commissioners, only one spoke and understood Quec-
hua, while another partially understood, thus maintaining a strong linguistic gap between
the mainly middle-class, male (except for two women), Lima-based commissioners and
the 75 percent Quechua- and other indigenous language-speaking victims. Carlos Iván
Degregori, “Heridas abiertas, derechos esquivos,” 82, n. 2.
29. Coxshall, “From the Peruvian Reconciliation Commission to Ethnography”; Mil-
ton, “At the Edge of the Peruvian Truth Commission”; Yezer, “Who Wants to Know?”
286, n. 10, 278.
30. González, “The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Chal-
lenge of Impunity,” 78.
31. The original composition included seven commissioners in 2001; President Toledo
added another five commissioners and one observer. The retired air force general later
distanced himself from the cvr’s work, signing his name, with other retired military
officers, on a public statement questioning the cvr’s conclusions.
32. Regalado de Hurtado, Clío y Mnemósine. For early summaries of the cvr’s work
for an international audience, see González, “The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation
Commission and the Challenge of Impunity”; Sánchez, “Hatun Willakuy, importancia
del relato en la política.”
33. Prior to the cvr’s conclusions, ngos, such as the Peruvian Coordinadora Nacional
de Derechos Humanos, estimated around 25,000 victims of the internal conflict.
34. This expression comes from Heilman, Before the Shining Path; the theme of neglect
and racism is also central in studies by de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, and Méndez,
The Plebeian Republic. The key earlier works on Shining Path are Manrique, El tiempo del
miedo; Poole and Rénique, Peru; Stern, Shining and Other Paths; Degregori, El surgimiento
de Sendero Luminoso; Degregori, Que difícil es ser Dios; Palmer, The Shining Path of Peru.
35. On the war and education, see García, Making Indigenous Citizens. Sixty-eight per-
cent of victims had no secondary schooling, as opposed to the national average of 40
percent. Seventy-nine percent of victims were from rural regions, and 56 percent were
agriculturalists (whereas in the 1993 census only 29 percent of Peruvians lived in rural
regions, and of the national population only 28 percent were engaged in agriculture).
cvr, “Conclusiones generales del Informe final de la cvr.”
36. cvr, Hatun Willakuy, 52–55.
37. Women provided most of the testimonies before the cvr. cvr, Informe final,
vol. 8, 89.
38. Lerner, La rebelión de la memoria, 147. Drinot also cites Lerner as advancing the
historical argument of exclusion, The Allure of Labor, 237.
39. The remaining 7 percent of violence was attributed to unknown actors. Please note
that these figures come from cvr, “Conclusiones generales del Informe final de la cvr”
and from cvr, Informe final, vol. 2, 232. Even within the Final Report these numbers vary
depending on the dataset analyzed. For instance, cvr, Informe final, vol. 2, 232 states that
Shining Path was responsible for 53.68 percent of deaths and disappearances, the armed
forces were responsible for 28.73 percent, and police forces 6.6 percent, versus annex
2, which attributes 46 percent Shining Path, 30 percent state agents, and 24 percent
other actors and circumstances (self-defense groups, mrta, paramilitaries, nonidentified
agents, and others who died in combat) as responsible for deaths and disappearances; see
cvr, Informe final, annex 2: 13, 17. In Hatun Willakuy, the violence committed by “state
agents — the military and police” is grouped with self-defense groups (rondas) and paramil-
itary to account for 37 percent of deaths and disappearances, of which “the armed forces
are responsible for a little more than three quarters of the cases”; see Hatun Willakuy, 10.
40. On the basis of his experience as a member of the Peruvian truth commission,
Eduardo González describes the internal debates over the choice between seeking out
“judicial truths,” or evidence that could be used by courts, and “historical truths” that
would help build a new narrative about the violence that would serve to undermine the
Fujimori version that denied crimes committed. Without making a specific decision,
the commission sought to prepare and provide as much information as possible for the
courts to pursue; González, “The Contribution of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation
Commission to Prosecutions,” 61–63.
introduction | 29
41. cvr, “Conclusiones generales del Informe final de la cvr.”

42. These categories of “salvation memory” versus “human rights memory” corre-
spond roughly to Steve J. Stern’s “heroic memory” and “dissident memory” in Stern,
Remembering Pinochet’s Chile. Paulo Drinot extrapolates two key versions in circulation
in the national discourse of why the violence occurred: one camp sees Shining Path as
singly responsible for the violence because Senderistas are inherently violent; the other
camp sees the most recent eruption of violence as an extension of the structural violence
that is inherent in Peruvian society and that had given rise to Shining Path and the
exacerbating response by the state, elite and middle-class citizens. Drinot, “For Whom
the Eye Cries,” 24–27. See also Theidon, “Disarming the Subject,” and Degregori, “La
palabra y la escucha.”
43. One example of several publication forwarding this salvation memory is retired
coronel Morán Reyna’s Complot contra los militares: Las falcedades de la C.V.R., a book
published in 2006 in defense of “my comrades who acted legally, and today are obligated
to prove their innocence” (n.p.).
44. The use of the narrative tropes borrowed from the Southern Cone countries —
dictatorship to democracy, and dirty war — can be misleading in the Peruvian context.
The Peruvian experience is not one of redemption — from dictatorship to democracy
(though there is a bit of this) and does not involve a “dirty war” waged by an authoritar-
ian state against its civilians, since most of the violence happened during democratically
elected governments (except for the period of Fujimori’s “self-coup” by which he dis-
solved Congress). In Peru there was initially a real threat from armed groups; thus, at
least until the capture of Abimael Guzmán and the later putting down of the mrta, the
state did not need to invent or exaggerate an armed opposition. Nevertheless, the armed
forces did act in ways that replicated other countries’ dirty war tactics against fellow
citizens. For a discussion of the meaning of “dirty war” see Stern’s afterword here and
Rénique, “ ‘People’s War,’ ‘Dirty War.’ ”
45. Drinot, “For Whom the Eye Cries,” 26.
46. Milton, “At the Edge of the Peruvian Truth Commission,” 13–15.
47. González, “The Contribution of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commis-
sion to Prosecutions,” 85, 91–92. The political scientist Jo-Marie Burt, who has been
closely monitoring the cases before the Peruvian judiciary, has noticed that the number
of prosecutions with sentences have dropped radically since the initial successes of hold-
ing perpetrators to account that culminated in the sentencing of Fujimori in 2009. Burt,
“The Paradoxes of Accountability.”
48. Much immediate post-cvr debate asserted that the statistics inflated the military
responsibility for death and disappearance. Yet, in the ten years since the cvr, there
seems to be a general feeling among researchers and human rights groups that the scale
of the military violence was underestimated in the Final Report. This latter observation
is based on my conversations with several researchers and members of Peruvian ngos,

as well as my own research into representations of the violence, discussed in my chapter
here. See also Leiby’s recoding of cvr testimonies in “Digging in the Archives,” 84, 91.
49. Degregori, “Heridas abiertas, derechos esquivos,” 84.
50. The cvr printed twenty thousand copies of Hatun Willakuy (2004), a 477-page
abbreviated version of the nine volumes and the annexes of the Final Report.
51. This expression comes from Laplante, “The Peruvian Truth Commission’s Histor-
ical Memory Project,” 444–445.
52. Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory.”
53. González, “Scarf of Hope as a Warm and Performative Memorial for the Disap-
peared in Peru.”
54. Website available at http://arteporlamemoria.wordpress.com, accessed July 10,
2013.
55. As one of the few memorial sites designed for a national audience, El Ojo que Llora
in Lima has received significant attention from families of victims and other stakehold-
ers, from vandals, from politicians, and from academics. See Drinot, “For Whom the Eye
Cries,” Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration, 42–62; Milton, “Defacing Memory,”
and Moraña, “El Ojo que Llora.”
56. Milton and Ulfe, “Promoting Peru”; Weissert, “Entre dos fuegos”; Feldman, “Ex-
hibiting Conflict.”
57. Jo-Marie Burt, “1097: La nueva cara de impunidad” (1097: the new face of im-
punity), NoticiasSER, August 9, 2010, www.noticiasser.pe, accessed July 15, 2013, and
unknown author, “La onu advirtió que el dl 1097 tiende a que violadores de derechos
humanos queden impunes,” El Comercio, September 8, 2010.
58. Human Rights Watch, “Peru: Reject ‘Terrorism Denial’ Law,” April 9, 2012, http://
www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/09/peru-reject-terrorism-denial-law, accessed May 23, 2013.
59. While aspiring to be a memorial for the nation, it was not a national government
project. El Ojo que Llora is a private initiative by the artist and architect with support of
ngos and municipal government.
60. On coca production and links to Shining Path in the Upper Huallaga Valley, see
Kernaghan, Coca’s Gone.
61. The cvr published the photography exhibition as a book Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar.
62. Milton and Ulfe, “Promoting Peru,” 213–216; Lane, “Spatial Truth and Reconcili-
ation.”
63. On the role of Yuyachkani in contesting violence during the war years and in re-
construction during the post-conflict period, see Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire,
190–211; and A’ness, “Resisting Amnesia.” See also Garza’s chapter here.
64. Laplante and Theidon, “Truth with Consequences.”
65. These eight modes of unofficial “truth-telling” are discussed for various countries
introduction | 31
(such as South Africa, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thai-
land, and former Yugoslavia) in Bilbija et al., The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian
Rule. See also Jelin and Longoni, Escrituras, imágenes y scenarios ante la represión; Bick-
ford, “Unofficial Truth Projects.”
66. In his book on Peruvian “popular art,” the art historian Pablo Macera includes one
chapter on protest art, a study of sixteenth-century mates burilados (painted gourds) that
depict scenes from the conquest. Macera, “El mate de la Conquista: ¿Arte protesta?” See
various protest art from the 1980s in Billie Jean Isbell’s Andean Collection at Cornell
University Library, http://isbellandes.library.cornell.edu/protest.html, accessed July 10,
2013.
67. Isbell, “Violence in Peru,” 287. Professional artists such as Juan Acevedo, Carlos
Tovar, Claudia Coca, Natalia Iguiñez, Claudio Jiménez Quispe, Luz Letts, Alfredo Már
quez, Claudia Martínez Garay, Jorge Miyagui, Cuco Morales, Piero Quijano, Santiago
Quintanilla, Hebert Rodríguez, Eduardo Tokeshi, Ángel Valdez, and Ricardo Wiesse
are just some of the many Peruvian artists who made protest art directed specifically at
the war years. Some of their works, and those of other artists, appear with reflections
on the role of art in remembering the violence in the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos,
Revista Argumentos 3, no. 4 (2009), esp. 30–51. Peruvian curators, most notably Gustavo
Buntinx, have built several exhibitions addressing Peru’s conflict: for instance, his ex-
hibitions Mallki: La exhumación simbólica del arte peruano, 1980–2000 (Mallki: Symbolic
Exhumation of Peruvian Art, 1980–2000), 2002; Carne viva: Partes de guerra 1980–2003
(Raw Flesh: Fragments of War 1980–2003), 2003; and País del mañana: Utopía y ruina en
la guerra civil peruana, 1980–2000 (Country of Tomorrow: Utopia and Ruin in the Peruvian
Civil War, 1980–2000), 2004. Buntinx also directs the Micromuseo, www.micromuseo.
org.pe, accessed July 10, 2013, an alternative museum project that holds small-scale
exhibitions, many of which have addressed specific events during the conflict (such as
the bombing on Tarata Street and the killing of nine students and one professor from
La Cantuta University).
68. In addition to the chapters by Ulfe and Ritter here, see Lemlij and Millones, Las
tablas de Sarhua; González, Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes; Ritter, “Com-
plementary Discourses of Truth and Memory” and We Bear Witness With Our Song;
Saona, “The Knowledge that Comes from Seeing”; Vich, El caníbal es otro, Ubilluz, Hib-
bet, and Vich, Contra el sueño de los justos, and the work of several emerging scholars. On
artforms as witnessing history, see Burke, Eyewitnessing; and Loew, “Traumatic Identity
in Contemporary Catalan Testimonies,” 24. See also note 11.
69. Cánepa, “The Public Sphere and Cultural Rights.”
70. Take for instance the massive civil society participation in the 2000 performance
of “lava la bandera” (washing the flag) whereby participants washed corruption out of
the Peruvian flag, thus cleaning the nation. Vich, “Lava la bandera.”
71. Drinot, “For Whom the Eye Cries,” 20.

72. Olga González’s study of Piraq Causa, a set of Sarhua tablas in the private collection
of Peter Gaupp, illustrates well how art travels across boarders and media. Gaupp com-
missioned the works, which were made in a Lima workshop by artists who had fled the
violence, and moved the works to his home in Costa Rica. The works have been exhib-
ited abroad. González brought the tablas back to the artists’ home community of Sarhua
as photocopies. Now the tablas are reproduced in color plates in her book Unveiling the
Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. Anyone can order this book through the Internet.
73. On the importation of Chilean arpillera techniques by women’s groups in Peru, see
Isbell, “Violence in Peru,” 287.
74  Rowe and Schelling, Memory and Modernity.
75. Part of our mistrust of art and images is the primacy that we have granted the writ-
ten and spoken word in the act of bearing witness. As Guerin and Hallas have pointed
out, “it is true that words are more frequently considered closer to the communication of
feeling and experience. Words, particularly those of oral testimony, are still connected to
the body of the sufferer while the material image implies a separation (spatial, temporal
or both) from that which it captures.” Guerin and Hallas, The Image and the Witness, 7.
76. Cited in Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 26.
77. Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” 61.
78. Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy.
79. Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” 60.
80. Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” 62. The veracity of testi
monio is broached differently in subsequent efforts by scholars to offer more participative
coauthored testimonials, such as that between Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef and Floren-
cia Mallon in When a Flower Is Reborn. Nevertheless, scholars might still try to question
testimoniantes about silences in their remembrances, thus challenging what they state as
knowing. See for instance, Lazzara, Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile, 78–80, 90–91.
81. Multiple narratives might be especially present in the case of public art such as
monuments and memorial sites whereby art addresses a heterogeneous audience. See
Young, The Texture of Memory, 6; and Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, 138–139.
82. Jelin and Longoni, Escrituras, imágenes y escenarios ante la represión, xvii–xviii.
83. On various efforts to curate pasts as promoting witnessing, see Lehrer and Milton,
“Witnesses to Witnessing.”
84. Isbell refers to the “dialogic breakthrough” that takes place between performers
and listeners; see “Violence in Peru,” 284.
85. For instance, the Asháninka, though singled out by the CVR as a having had a
particular experience of the political conflict, often slip out of larger conversations about
the war years. The Instituto de Estudios Peruanos’s Memory Group (Grupo Memoria)
introduction | 33
promotes regional studies by young scholars. See www.iep.org.pe/grupomemoria.html,

accessed July 10, 2013. See also Rénique, La batalla por Puno.
86. Many professional artists not discussed here witnessed and experienced the war
years directly. An insightful documentary, Against the Grain: An Artist’s Survival Guide
to Peru by the Japanese-American director Ann Kaneko examines the art and practices
of art-making during and after the war years through the work of four Lima-based art-
ists: Claudio Jiménez Quispe (originally from Ayacucho), Alfredo Márquez, Eduardo
Tokeshi, and Natalia Iguíñiz.
87. Poole and Rojas-Pérez, “Memories of Reconciliation.”
88. The work mentioned here is by British artist Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary
(1996).
89. While important for reaching an understanding, empathy can also lead to over
identification. LaCapra, Writing Trauma, Writing History, esp. chap. 3; Bennett, Empa
thetic Vision.
90. Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, 142.
91. Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration, 54–55.
92. Milton, “Defacing Memory.”
93. An entryway into these Shining Path memories is through the testimonies gath-
ered and analyzed by Rénique in La voluntad encarcelada.
94. In this regard, the publication by the military of their account of the internal
conflict, En Honor a la Verdad: Versión del Ejército sobre su participación en la defensa del
sistema democrático contra las organizaciones terroristas (In Honour of the Truth: The
Army’s Version of Its Participation in the Defence of Democracy Against Terrorist Or-
ganizations), with other sources such as memoires by state actors, are useful for the elu-
cidation of different versions of this shared past. The recent memoire by Lurgio Gavilán
indicates the difficulty of separating memories neatly into categories of those of a hero/
perpetrator/victim, among others. Gavilán recounts his childhood as a Senderista, then
adolescence as a soldier — both periods in which he inflicted harm upon others and in
which he himself seemed to suffer — and ends with his adult years as a Franciscan monk
turned anthropologist.
95. To mark the fifteenth anniversary of the April 22, 1997, liberation of mrta
prisoners — and the death of all the mrta hostage-takers — a special homage was per-
formed and broadcast on state television, in addition to the annual reenactment of the
rescue, known as “Chavín de Huántar.” For the 2012 homage, in the presence of Jap-
anese residents, former hostages, and state representatives, the military reenacted the
successful rescue with explosives, gunfire, and much drama. The case of the extrajudicial
killings of mrta members in the state operation “Chavín de Huántar” is presently before
the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. For a recent foray into state armed actors’
uses of culture, in particular museum exhibitions and historical reenactment, see Mil-
ton, “Curating Memories of Armed State Actors in Peru’s Era of Transitional Justice.”
96. Milton, “Parallel Lies?” On the armed forces and their memories in the face of
human rights discourses, see Hershberg and Agüero, Memorias militares sobre la repres
sion en el Cono Sur.
97. Reátegui Carrillo, “Violencia y ficción,” 449.

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ART FROM A

Cynthia E. Milton, ed i tor

With an afterword by Steve J. Stern

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2014

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the

introduction | cynthia e. milton

one | cynthia e. milton

two | edilberto jiménez quispe

three | maría eugenia ulfe

four | víctor vich

five | luis rossell, alfredo villar, and jesús cossio

six | ponciano del pino

seven | ricardo caro cárdenas

eight | cynthia m. garza

nine | jonathan ritter

afterword | steve j. stern

a rt from peru’s fr act u r ed pa st

impedes comprehension. Yet the internal war of Peru necessitates reflection

From the Internal Conflict to Memory Battles

SAN MARTÍN BRAZIL

map 1. Deaths and disappearances (1980–2000) according to Comisión de la Verdad y

Americana (apra), Fujimoristas (supporters of Fujimori), some high-level church

government’s donation of funds to build a memory museum in Lima. Steadily,

figure i.1. Sculpture by

processed in Peruvian courts for human rights violations committed prior to

figure i.2. El Ojo que

Truth-Telling by Other Means

realm of our understanding.” 61 The commission drew on established grassroots

Bearing Witness through Creation: An Aesthetic Pursuit of Truth

veracity of Rigoberta Menchú’s assisted autobiographical account of the Guate-

and remembrance and as such are valid, indispensable sources of historical

map 2. Department of Ayacucho. Cartography by Bill Nelson.

comprehend them? Is there a difference between urban and rural reception of

Remembering through Art: the Limits of Empathy and Truth

in response to what he sees as widespread efforts to ignore Peru’s fractured past,

41. cvr, “Conclusiones generales del Informe final de la cvr.”

is based on my conversations with several researchers and members of Peruvian ngos,

71. Drinot, “For Whom the Eye Cries,” 20.

promotes regional studies by young scholars. See www.iep.org.pe/grupomemoria.html,

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41. cvr, “Conclusiones generales del Informe final de la cvr.”

71. Drinot, “For Whom the Eye Cries,” 20.